The Reassurance, Irrelevance and Gratuitous Polarization of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address 2024
The State of the Union has some unwritten conventions beyond the Constitutional requirement that “He [sic] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he sic) shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Actually, it need not be an address – some were written; some were routinized – and starting with Harry Truman, they have been televised. In 1966 began the tradition of a response by the party out of presidential power of which almost none has been historic in the slightest.
Last night President Joe Biden’s SOTU was memorable and the Republican response was strong, but the former is the topic of this article.
The criteria for evaluation, correct or incorrect, were consensually agreed on: 1. Did his delivery imply that his age was crippling him; 2. Did he address all of the consensually salient issues and how well did he address them; and 3. Was there an attempt to create some unity in a polarized country?
This longtime (over a half-century) professor of political persuasion at Towson University gave him a “B” on the first, a “C” on the second, and an F on the third.
DELIVERY: B: His delivery: somehow delivery of a speech from a teleprompter became the measure of the operational manifestation of his age. His oratorical skills were strong, if off-putting. Yelling for over an hour with good emphasis, faltering only when he went off-script to respond to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s demand that he say the name – Laken Riley – of the nursing student “Lincoln” Riley, murdered by what Biden called an “illegal” in a semi-prepared response, irritated everyone, but mostly Republicans. Interpretation by Democrats: he’s alive, well, and not a blithering fool; actually their reaction was more positive than that, but that was at least the consensus of his supporters and semi-doubters.
ISSUES: C: Biden waited until about 40 minutes had passed in the SOTU speech before he mentioned the immigration crisis, on which 2/3 of Americans opposed his actions or inactions. He first noted the Ukraine crisis, on which, full disclosure, I am with him. Let Putin succeed, and a world war is likely if not certain.
Biden’s waiting until he had completed about 60% of his speech to address the border issues where we are heading into 10 million (!) illegals (I like Biden’s term here) being allowed into the United States. He continues to blame the failure new nonpartisan immigration bill – some truth there, but it is completely blind to his first 3 years in office, on the heels of the president and Mayorkas’s “no problem there” open border policy. Biden continued to be tone-deaf in his celebration of the economy, which left incredulous Americans fighting increased costs of food and everyday living. Further, his assessment of economic gains was part of the misleading legerdemain of his claims. (See friendly Biden Washington Post source Glenn Kessler’s excellent analysis of Bidenomics and Biden’s claim “I’ve already cut the federal deficit by over 1 trillion dollars.”: Fact-checking President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address – The Washington Post
AMERICAN UNITY: F: “Nice Guy” Joe Biden has left the building. If I hear another reflection of what a kind, decent guy President Biden is, I shall jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Periodic, often incongruous, smiles do not a nice person make. His claims that Republicans actually threaten democracy, his belittling their concerns about immigration invasion, his open contempt for candidate-to-be Trump, his diminishing of the righteous anger of the victims of Hamas’ invasion, Israel, and his general derision of conservatives and winks to the radical left, who heartily cheered his entire speech, left no room for the speech I was hoping in vain to hear: “The New Comity.” If the Republican side of Congress stood once in applause, that was it.
For the second straight year, Biden claimed the State of the Union is “strong.” He may have won himself some weeks on the claim that he is cognitively near-solid, but from his SOTU it appears that the country is fragile, the status of our foreign policy is insubstantial and America’s polarization is not a problem to be solved but the president’s re-election strategy.
Richard E. Vatz is professor emeritus of political rhetoric at Towson University and author of The Only Authentic of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model (Authors Press, 2022) and many other works, essays and op-eds. He is a Distinguished Professor at Towson University and has won a number of teaching awards.